Birth registration is the foundational instrument of child protection, since without legal recognition children remain invisible to the state, are shut out of healthcare, education, social services and justice, and become acutely vulnerable to child marriage, exploitation, trafficking and statelessness. This is a significant Commonwealth problem: roughly a third of children under one and a fifth under five across the Commonwealth are unregistered, several major contributors to global unregistered births (India, Pakistan, Nigeria) are member states, and Commonwealth countries feature heavily among those with the highest rates of child labour and child marriage.

The Policy Brief, produced as part of the CommonProtect initiative, demonstrates that progress is achievable – the 2022 Kigali Declaration gives all 56 member states a mandate for coordinated action, and examples from South Asia, Africa, the Pacific and the Caribbean show registration rates can rise dramatically within a decade or two. The most effective reforms are legal rather than purely administrative: empowering frontline health workers to register births at delivery, making birth certificates the foundational legal identity document, and ensuring digital systems are legally safeguarded to protect rather than expose vulnerable families. Such models are transferable across the Commonwealth’s shared legal and administrative systems.